I know Travis' and Paul Dubois[0] work at Livermore was immediately recognized as of towering importance almost immediately. I was down the highway at LBNL por

I know Travis' and Paul Dubois[0] work at Livermore was immediately recognized as of towering importance almost immediately. I was down the highway at LBNL porting shitty Mathematica, IDL[1] and Fortran Diffraction Grating code to Numeric or whatever they called Numpy back then almost as soon as it was released. People probably don't remember their history, but pretty much the only open source intepreters of the day were things like Perl (whose math capabilities at the time were pretty lousy). Scientists paid for a shitload of Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab and Igor[2] licenses; and there still weren't enough licenses to share code with your friends, because nobody had licenses for them all. Python 1.5 was the first non-mentat tier open source interpreter available that didn't get in your way as a scientist, and Numeric/Numpy was the first and still the most elementary piece that made it usable to science and numerics people. Might not have been letters to Nature tier back then, but Nature ain't what it used to be anyhow. [0] Since a lot of folks have actually forgotten Paul: http://www.pfdubois.com/bio.html http://www.pfdubois.com/bio.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGOR_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGOR_Pro